The sound design during the interrogation scene near the beginning of Coffee with D has this weirdly aggressive high-frequency hum that never quite goes away once the coffee machine starts wheezing in the background. It is a small thing, but it bugged me for twenty minutes because nobody in the room seems to acknowledge it, least of all the boom operator who let it crawl all over Sunil Grover’s opening monologue like an uninvited insect. Hindi movies have a long history of ignoring ambient noise problems in dialogue-heavy setups, sure, but this particular whine feels less like an oversight and more like a deliberate choice to test the audience's patience before the narrative even catches its breath.

Director Vishal Mishra is working from a script by Dushyant Pratap Singh that wants desperately to be a sharp-edged media satire along the lines of Welcome to Sajjanpur, yet keeps tripping over its own feet whenever the tone threatens to shift from broad farce to something resembling an actual thriller. The setup is simple enough to fit on a matchbook, following an ambitious television journalist who lands the interview of a lifetime with an elusive underworld figure hiding out in Pakistan, but the execution relies almost entirely on repetitive cross-cutting between a control room full of sweating producers and the sunny patio where the actual sit-down is supposed to happen. It's an okay way to build suspense, I guess, though the cuts often arrive half a beat too early, robbing the punchlines of their natural momentum while underlining jokes that were already painfully obvious to anyone paying even casual attention.

Sunil Grover plays Arnab Ghosh with that peculiar brand of breathless, bug-eyed earnestness we all remember from his television days, throwing his whole body into every single reaction shot as though he's terrified the camera might wander off if he stays still for more than three seconds. He lacks the effortless anchor that someone like Irrfan Khan brought to similarly manic journalistic roles in films like D-Day, which means every time Grover has to shift from comedic bluster to genuine terror, the transition feels less like a character arc and more like an actor frantically changing gears in the middle of a steep hill. His chemistry with Dipannita Sharma, who plays his supportive yet perpetually stressed producer, is hampered mostly by dialogue that treats exposition like a relay baton that needs to be dropped every few sentences.

Zakir Hussain as the titular D, modelled rather transparently on Dawood Ibrahim, strolls through the second half of the film with an amused, half-lidded boredom that instantly sucks the energy right out of every scene he occupies. He doesn't chew the scenery; he nibbles at it politely, wearing embroidered silk robes and sipping espresso while casually discussing contract hits the way a suburban dad might talk about lawn fertilizer. This restrained approach is an interesting counterpoint to Grover’s hyperactivity, but the screenplay doesn't give Hussain anything substantial to do with his stillness, reducing a genuinely menacing screen presence to a series of smug one-liners and lingering close-ups that feel lifted from an entirely different, much cheaper picture.

The cinematography by Anshul Chobey bounces between brightly lit studio interiors that look like a daytime talk show set and murky night exteriors where the digital grading is so heavy it turns every shadow a bruised purple. Whenever the narrative moves to the Karachi safehouse, the color palette shifts to a baked-out amber that screams television serial rather than theatrical feature, flattening the visual depth until the actors look like cardboard cutouts pasted onto stock footage of palm trees. This cheapness extends to the background score by Paresh Shah, which relies on a thunderous, electronic heartbeat motif every time a character makes a decision that is supposed to carry weight, hammering the same four-note bassline until your ears feel bruised.

There is an obvious political satire beating somewhere beneath all this messy plotting, poking fun at the relentless sensationalism of modern television news where ratings matter far more than actual journalistic integrity or national security. Yet the film is too cowardly to pick a side, preferring to mock the media circus on one hand while treating its protagonist's reckless stunts as genuine heroism on the other, resulting in a toothless critique that punches sideways at easy targets while leaving the larger systems of media manipulation completely untouched. Indian cinema has struggled for decades to find a comfortable register for contemporary satire, often falling back on loud caricature whenever the material requires actual teeth, and this production falls squarely into that same muddy trap without ever realizing it.

Supporting characters drift in and out of the narrative with very little rhyme or reason, including a sidekick cameraman played with frantic exhaustion who exists solely to ask stupid questions so Grover can explain the plot to the audience one more time. These little narrative crutches pile up until the second hour feels less like a dramatic confrontation and more like a series of sketches stitched together with fishing line, where the logic of one scene rarely survives the transition into the next. When the credits finally roll, you are left wondering who this movie was actually made for, since the comedy is too broad for political junkies and the politics are too clumsy for anyone looking for a straight thriller.

The closing sequence resolves its central standoff with a bizarrely abrupt edit that cuts straight to black on a close-up of Grover blinking in confusion, as if the editors simply ran out of hard drive space and decided to call it a day right there on the patio.